Apparently in California, several companies currently testing driverless cars are experimenting with having a centre full of humans who can take control of cars via remote control in "difficult" situations.

As of yet, none of them have decided how many cars a given user will be watching (and by extension, the State of California has no data to base potential regulation of such a system on). The only existing comparison is that of air-traffic controllers, who are responsible for coordinating the movements of up to 15 airplanes. However, these planes all have human pilots and those pilots are by law expected to overrule an air-traffic controller if they believe the directions they've been given will endanger the aircraft. Driverless cars will obviously have no such analogue.

Without strict legislation, I would also expect johnnycab robocab companies to come under extreme pressure to get the ratio as high as they think is feasible, given that the whole point of driverless cars is to eliminate labour costs as much as possible and the fact that they are all locked in desperate competition.

A black hole doesn't "pull" things any more than a planet of the same weight would. The difference is 1) they're usually considerably heavier than planets and 2) there's no ground to hit so you just keep falling.

But it's perfectly possible to, for example, orbit a black hole and even leave that orbit if it's not inside the event horizon. It's possible for a black hole to orbit another black hole.

It's even possible for one black hole to slingshot-fling another one at high speed.

The whole point of a black hole is that no matter or energy can escape. Two black holes means twice as much matter and energy doesn't escape. So a collision of two black holes is completely silent, except for gravitational waves that don't behave like matter or energy, which is how they proved they exist in the first place.

The first time I wrote this post it had sources linked. As it is something something Hawking radiation? idk man I'm a cook not an astrophysicist

mharr wrote:Do we have any idea what happens when event horizons touch? I'm guessing it's a moderately energetic event.

ok, one correction to my earlier statement: Black holes that are very close to each other (at least ten times Pluto's orbit or less) radiate a lot of energy in the form of gravitational waves, and so their orbit decays.

now i'm gonna do something else because studying this sort of stuff gives me anxiety